Electrical power is conventionally supplied to a data processing system by a power supply unit. A power supply unit is a component of a data processing system that transforms, converts, or otherwise conditions electrical power received from, for example, the power grid and provides the transformed, converted, or conditioned electrical power to one or more other components of the data processing system.
In many data processing systems, multiple power supply units supply power to the various components of the data processing system. Multiple power supply units are often employed to provide increased power, as well as provide redundancy so that a catastrophic failure and complete shutdown of the data processing system can be avoided. Several power supply units enable the operation of the data processing system under partial power conditions. Further, more than one power supply unit is common in many data processing systems with several processors.
In one implementation, a data processing system resides within an electronics rack, which may be, for example, a stand alone computer processing system having high, mid or low-end processing capability. As circuit densities continue to increase at all levels of packaging, there is an ever-growing need for providing more power to the data processing system, such as to an electronics rack comprising one or more electronics subsystems. Further, this need to provide power continues to exist notwithstanding various atypical conditions which may occur in the power supply assembly.